A former patrol officer on the Sea Gate police department – a tiny force serving the private, largely Orthodox Jewish community on Coney Island – has filed a federal racial discrimination suit.

Christopher Simmons, who is black, says his problem began when he was performing crowd control duties during a building fire in the gated community on April 15, 2009.

Simmons says that after he kept the president of the Sea Gate Association from crossing a police line intended to keep bystanders out of danger, the angry official called him a “Schwartze” – a German or Yiddish word meaning “black” and used derogatorily.

Following that incident, Simmons claims that he became the target of a series of complaints within the police department.

He was reprimanded for sleeping in his patrol car on two separate occasions, charged with insubordination after failing to lock a file cabinet, and accused of accessing computer information without authorization.

He claims that he was targeted for racial reasons after making a complaint about his mistreatment to the New York state Division of Human Rights.